Ask Not for Whom the Bridge Tolls

Louise Nelson Dyble was a small-town girl from the mountains of northeastern Washington
state when she first saw the San Francisco Bay Area bridges. They blew her away.

“I was amazed and fascinated by the city,” she says. “The whole urban landscape really
struck me, especially these enormous bridges. I was always interested in power, and
if nothing else, they definitely manifested power.”

Now an assistant professor of social sciences at Michigan Technological University,
Dyble was then a history major at the University of California at Berkeley. Her interest
turned to transportation, urban studies and the bridges, especially the Golden Gate,
which links the tony bedroom communities of Marin County to the traffic-clogged streets
of San Francisco.

“Those bridges required a huge commitment of resources, and they didn’t make sense,”
she said. “Why bring all these cars to a tiny peninsula with chronic traffic jams
and no parking?”

Dyble was by then working on a PhD in History, and answering that question seemed
a perfect dissertation topic. She began by asking the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway
District for its records. The bridge district public relations officer met her request
with prohibitive insurance requirements, claiming the agency could not accept liability
for her presence at its offices. Besides, she was told, there already was a history
of the bridge, and she could buy it at the gift shop.

Dyble figured then that she was onto a great story, and she was. “Paying the Toll:
Local Power, Regional Politics and the Golden Gate Bridge,” the book based on her
dissertation, has received the Abel Wolman Award. Presented by the Public Works Historical
Society, it recognizes the best new work in public works history.

Dyble tells the tale of the Golden Gate Bridge from 1923, when it was a mere twinkle
in the eyes of Northern California boosters, who hoped to lure tourists and their
dollars north, and San Francisco leaders, who felt a link with Marin County would
cement their city’s position as the region’s main metropolis. “Paying the Toll” then
tracks the history of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District—a special agency
formed just to finance and build the bridge. Although voters were promised that the
bridge would be free once it was paid for, the bridge district didn’t want to die. Instead,
it fought for survival and won, despite a growing reputation for extravagance and
corruption. For the toll-paying public, the district became a loathed symbol of government
gone wrong.

While the story is compelling, particularly to commuters saddled with five- and six-dollar
daily tolls, the take away is less about the bridge district and more about how things
work. “Often you think that the people who were responsible for a project were the
ones who actually benefit in the end,” says Dyble. “But they are not always the winners.
Decision-making can be extremely complex, and the best intentions can backfire. At
the local level there are fantastic power struggles that affect our daily lives by
shaping where and how we live.”

Historians can shine light on those struggles. The work can be exhaustive; Dyble went
through hundreds of boxes of files pried from the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District
courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act request. “Other good resources are planning
and engineering reports,” she says. “A lot of paperwork is generated by consultants and
bureaucrats, but they always have a perspective and an agenda. You aren’t going to
get real dirt from those.”

For that, you need the fourth estate. An entire shelf of Dyble’s office is devoted
to binders of newspaper clippings; Bay Area newspapers had published one exposé after
another on the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District starting in the 1930s. They
also published plenty of editorial cartoons lambasting the district. Many are reprinted
in “Paying the Toll”; Dyble calls them her favorite part of the book.

She bemoans the loss of a number of newspapers she used in her research, including
the San Francisco Examiner. “You only get good investigative journalism if there are
multiple competing newspapers,” she says. “Hopefully the new media will take up that
slack.”

Dyble is now applying her fascination with transportation and power to two other projects.
She is collaborating on a book on the reengineering of the food industry, looking
at how the US highway system combined with containerized shipping to push out local
foods and enable the rise of corporate agriculture and the supermarket.

She’s also looking at the rise of toll roads and bridges, in particular the Pennsylvania
Turnpike. “It has a lot in common with the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District,”
she says, adding cryptically, “Pennsylvania is an interesting state.”

“Paying the Toll” is a cautionary tale for any community grappling with financing
a major public works project. US infrastructure is in a state of disrepair, and fixing
it extremely expensive. To cash-strapped state and local governments, handing projects
over to quasi-independent authorities like the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District
can seem like an ideal solution. But yielding control often has a price down the road.
“If the only focus is on building infrastructure and getting it financed quickly and
cheaply, you can get in trouble,” says Dyble. “You have to consider the long-term
consequences of how you do it.” The winners may not be who you think.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than
7,000 students from 60 countries around the world. Founded in 1885, the University
offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology,
engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics,
and social sciences. Our beautiful campus in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula overlooks
the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.